Namecheap under DDOS, and their DNS services effectively offline
 

This also affects their service status page http://status.namecheap.com/ , which is unreachable at the moment.

It seems you are correct - Remember if you are testing your own sites will probably be in cache and you will see them...

Others wont though.....

"We're experiencing a DDoS attack on our DNSv2 system at the moment - this means that any domains that are using DNSv2 or FreeDNS nameservers may experience intermittent availability issues.We are currently in the process of mitigating the attack and are working hard to ensure a quick resolution. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused."

fuck, "awesome" :|

edit: just tried two sites via hidemyass and are working..

It doesn't matter if you're using their built in DNS or your own registered via your NC control panel, all DNS requests still go to the registrar first, then to your custom name server.

The attack is causing intermittent outages due to long DNS resolution times. Sites will work fine one minute, then fail to resolve the next, then come back again.

The attack is also affecting Google services and ISP routing w/ some carrier hops failing to respond to connection requests. The issue started sometime this past weekend and has grown since then to the point where it's becoming a serious pain in the ass.

so this is the reason .